Small cell technology refers to deploying a large number of low-power small cell nodes based on wide coverage macro base station network, according to service requirements and geographical environment, to improve coverage and the capacity of the network and meet requirements of users in the mobile Internet era. In future ultra-dense network deployments, there may be up to hundreds of small cells in a macro base station cell.
Existing small cells, such as a home base station (femto), use a wired backhaul link, such as an Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL)/Ethernet, to return information of the femto to a femto gateway. The wired backhaul link, such as the ADSL/Ethernet, can be a backhaul link of a femto home operator. That is, the femto uses the backhaul link of the home operator network and returns the information of the femto to the femto gateway of the home operator network. The wired backhaul link, such as the ADSL/Ethernet, can also be the backhaul link of a third-party operator. That is, the femto uses a backhaul link of the third-party operator network, and transmits the information of the femto to the femto gateway of the home operator network, using a public IP network of the third-party operator and transmission interfaces of the third-party operator and the home operator network.
For a small cell using the wired backhaul link, such as ADSL/Ethernet, if the wired backhaul link is the backhaul link of the home operator, a quality of service (QoS) of the small cell can be better ensured. Due to the small cell gateway being mainly in the home operator network, and information of the small cell can arrive at the small cell gateway directly, it does not need to be transmitted for long distance span gateways of different operators. If the backhaul link of the small cell is the backhaul link of the third-party operator, the QoS of the small cell cannot be reliably ensured. Before arriving at the small cell gateway, the information of the small cell needs to be transmitted in a long distance to reach a network interface between the third-party operator network and the home operator network. After arriving at the home operator network through the network interface, it is finally transmitted to the small cell gateway through the home operator network. In general, the network interfaces of different operator networks are transmission bottlenecks, and routing of the information transmission is long. Thus, ensuring the QoS of the small cell is difficult.
For historical reasons, the wired backhaul network resources of certain operators are relatively few, but user quantity is large. For example, there are three operators in China. Scale of backbone network capacity of China Mobile is 1/10 compared with the China Telecommunication/Communication. However, the number of users of the China Mobile is 4 times/2.5 times compared with the China Telecommunication/Communication respectively. In future ultra-dense network deployment, there may be up to hundreds of small cells in a macro base station cell, and the amount of traffic required by a single user is expected to be greatly increased. For the backbone networks of the China Mobile, the large-scale network backhaul is difficult to support. Cost of building a backhaul network is high, thus sharing a backhaul network of a third-party operator becomes a very feasible solution.
There is a need for a new technical solution, which can share the backhaul resources of a plurality of different communication networks. The resource utilization rate needs to be improved, and the QoS of the resource sharing device ought to be ensured.